Bulgakov's diaries that go beyond 'A Young Doctor's Notebook'

John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe (L-R) playing in the British comedic drama “A Young Doctor’s Notebook,” based on Mikhail Bulgakov's diaries. Source: Kinopoisk.ru

“A Young Doctor’s Notebook,” recently caused a sensation on television in the United Kingdom, but it’s not the only autobiographical work by Mikhail Bulgakov. Russia Beyond the Headlines brings more of the great writer’s literary diaries out of the dusty archives.

Mikhail
Bulgakov has recently become deeply associated with the actors Daniel Radcliffe,
John Hamm and the British TV show “A Young Doctor’s Notebook.”

The premiere of
the four-part comedy drama brought Sky Arts one of its biggest audiences to
date. All this came as something of a surprise in Russia, where the collection
is nowhere near as popular as some of Bulgakov’s other works.

Like
Anton Chekhov, Bulgakov was a doctor. He graduated from Kiev University medical
school with distinction. Bulgakov took a job as the doctor for a clinic in Nikolskoe, a village about 200 miles (300 km) from Moscow.

But in
those days, traveling to an emergency at night by troika through mounds of
snow, it might as well have been 2,000 miles from the metropolis.

Bulgakov’s
semi-autobiographical stories from this period were printed in the 1920s in an
obscure journal called Medical Worker. These stories were not known to the literary
mainstream of the time.

The author was blacklisted by Soviet authorities, who
had a special distaste for his work, especially the sad and hilarious novel,
“The Heart of a Dog.”

The doctor stories were published together only in 1963,
long after his death, and then not without the input of censors.

Like
Anton Chekhov, Bulgakov was a doctor. Source: wikipedia

The
script for the TV drama, like the story collection, begins with a young,
inexperienced doctor who goes to work in a village in the middle of nowhere.
Immediately, he is called upon to extract teeth, supervise births and treat syphilis.

Radcliffe masterfully depicts the panic of the protagonist, who scurries from
the patient in agony back to his room to consult his medical textbooks.

Other
colorful storylines appear in the TV series: They include the doctor’s
relationship with the nurse – the only vaguely young woman in the vicinity, and
the hero’s hopeless addiction to morphine which leads to his demise.

While the
TV version differs from the original story, we know that Bulgakov was intimate
with addiction – and maybe this is why he is able to describe the seductiveness
of morphine so powerfully.

However Bulgakov denied that he had been addicted to
morphine and told his first wife Tatiana Lappa: “I am writing a story about a
doctor who is ill. And since you are quite an impressionable person, as I see
it, you will immediately assume the story is about me.”

“A
Young Doctor’s Notebook” is not the only collection that draws heavily from
Bulgakov’s life. Other lesser-known works offer small epiphanies about him. “Notes
on the Cuff” (1923) is drawn from Bulgakov’s professional life, and especially
his experience of living on a writer’s salary in post-revolutionary chaos.

Related:

The
work is fragmented, just as if it were written “off the cuff,” in this case. Part
of the work was lost completely, and perhaps in part this gives the text its
fragmented style.

Yet the fact that some things are left unsaid seems
completely natural: The main character, ill with typhus, is delirious—and surrounded
by mysterious events. Bulgakov also pokes fun at the Soviet authorities in
charge of censorship – he had scores to settle with them.

The
Soviet authorities reluctantly allowed some of his plays to premier on the
stage, before finally banning them one by one. In a letter to the Russian
writer and dramatist Maxim Gorky, Bulgakov wrote:

“All my plays are banned,
there is not a single line of my prose printed anywhere, I have no whole work
anywhere, not a penny of writer’s royalties and none likely to come any time
soon, not one organization or person answers my petitions, in short – everything
I have written in the Soviet Union over the past ten years has been destroyed.
The only thing yet to be destroyed is me.”

Bulgakov
considered “A Theatrical Novel,” his best work. It was written in his signature
note-like style that is typical of Bulgakov – and again autobiographical in
nature.

The narrator reads “notes of the dead” supposedly given to the writer
by someone about to commit suicide, with the request that nothing be edited or
changed. These notes, despite the fact that they were written ten years after “Notes
on the Cuff” and “A Young Doctor’s Notebook,” portray similar explorations of
despair.

The
classically unhappy journalist in the novel writes for a maritime newspaper; he
decides to quit his boring job to write a novel. The guests he invites to his
house flatter and embrace him, eat and drink, but then tell him to his face
that the novel is terrible and will
never be printed.

Then they promise him that his novel will be staged at a
theater instead, but deceive him. Sadly, Bulgakov had experienced each of
these situations personally.

Joseph
Stalin himself refused to approve Bulgakov’s play “Days of the Turbins” – a
play based on the novel of one of his earliest autobiographical works, “The White
Guard.”

It examines the toll the revolution has taken on the everyday life
of the Turbin family. Readers feel the tumult as war encroaches on family life
and the horrors of civil war unfold during an especially harsh winter in Kiev.

Blizzards are one of Bulgakov’s favorite motifs, and these storms make brutally
effective appearances in “White Guard” and “A Young Doctor’s Notebook.” For
Bulgakov, snow both accompanies and generates chaos and confusion.

In fact all
of the trials that characterized his work - the civil war, unjust authorities,
illness and despair—also characterized his life. What is truly moving is the
sometimes funny, always terrifying beauty he made of it all.